The resurgence of optimism among UK manufacturing businesses presents both challenges and opportunities to SMEs. Opportunities because optimistic businesses are more likely to invest in products and services to facilitate their own growth – i.e., more sales prospects for your business! But what about challenges?
A resurgent industry is also a more competitive industry, so to sustain your online visibility, attract qualified leads, and sustain your industry authority, you will need to adapt your search marketing and SEO strategies to align with customer expectations and industry trends.
Let’s look at how you can gear up your search strategy for success as the industry prepares for growth.
Update Your Target Keywords
One of the foundational pillars of successful search marketing for manufacturing businesses is accurate keyword research and optimisation. All this talk about growth over the past year may have prompted your customers to subtly change their search priorities. In other words, they may be asking different questions and looking for different kinds of answers. The answers you provided over the past few years may no longer resonate fully with your target personas, so now is a good time to update your target keywords, identifying a range of keywords specific to your business, including industry terms, services, and product categories.
However, it’s not just the keywords and phrases you use, but understanding the user search intent behind these keywords that can help you capture traffic seeking your solutions. Diversify your keyword base with longtail keywords that reflect niche topic areas – these may drive lower traffic volumes but be less competitive – and integrate the selected keywords strategically into your content meta titles, descriptions, headers, and articles to maximise visibility and relevance in the search engines.
Carry Out An SEO Audit
Much of the nuts and bolts work of SEO takes place behind the scenes, ‘under the bonnet’ of your website, so to speak. Conducting a thorough SEO audit from time to time is therefore essential for maintaining high website performance and search visibility. ‘Technical SEO’ relates to search engine related issues, such as indexability, site speed, crawlability, and mobile friendliness. By systematically streamlining your website for better search visibility, you can improve the relative ranking of your site on Google. However, Technical SEO isn’t simply for the bot’s benefit, but can also improve user experience and reduce bounce rate. For example, optimising your site speed through image compression, code streamlining, and server optimisation – as well as implementing a responsive mobile design and structured data markup for people using mobile devices – will make your website a more pleasant place to visit for your target customers.
Backlink Building And Outreach
Building a strong and diverse ‘backlink profile’ is essential for boosting your domain authority and credibility. But what does this mean in practice? Backlinks are inbound hyperlinks pointing back to your website from another source, and are used by Google to determine the authority, credibility, and trustworthiness of your website when it comes to search results. Backlinks are considered to be votes of confidence from other websites, and are viewed by search engines as signals of relevance and endorsement.
So, how do you encourage other industry stakeholders and authorities to link back to your site? Firstly, create content and resources that are worth linking to! A good way to do this in the current climate is to research the questions that manufacturing business owners are asking right now, and creating authoritative content to address these issues. You may even wish to publish a free e-book on the topic, encouraging both back links and traffic to your website. Another way is to use an SEO tool to identify broken links on other manufacturing websites and blogs that point to similar content to yours. This gives you an opportunity to reach out to the site owner, suggesting that they replace the broken link with a link to relevant content on your website.
What Next?
By keeping your finger on the pulse of industry trends and what your customers are looking for from a service provider, you can update your content and search strategy to maintain your business’s relevance, authority, and visibility in a rapidly changing sector. To find out more about SEO and how you can improve your visibility, please get in touch with JDR today by calling 01332 982022.
